Way, way back when, when computers were still exciting in the 1980s, I tried my hand at being a computer consultant. I did not like it, not one bit.
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\nHaving a knowledge of computers beyond the typical person, I was frequently asked how things work, to help someone out, or to offer advice. Lot of folks said, “Dan, you should be a computer consultant!”<\/p>\n
I had no idea what that meant.<\/p>\n
Eventually, I figured that a computer consultant was someone you paid to fix problems. Seeing how I felt I could accomplish the task, I took on the job. I didn’t advertise. I didn’t promote. Still, I remember doing the job on and off for a few months. I charged the massive sum of $60 an hour, one hour minimum.<\/p>\n
Despite the urging of my friends, I recall making only two official visits as a computer consultant. Both of them were wracked with disappointment.<\/p>\n
The first call was from an advertising agency. They paid me to read some of their copy and to sit in on meetings where they worked with a computer company client. It was boring because the computer company wanted to be the next Dell Computer and they had no freaking idea what they were doing. So I sat in on some meetings and got paid for it.<\/p>\n
A few weeks later the advertising agency phoned me up. Their modem wasn’t working. I explained that I charge $60 an hour to come down and look at it, but there was no charge if I couldn’t fix it. “That was fine,” they said, “Fine!” They wanted the modem to work.<\/p>\n
So I shoed up, tool bag in hand, looked at the computer. Looked at the phone cable. Looked at the phone jack on the wall. And I plugged the phone cable into the phone jack. Problem solved. Total time spent: Four minutes, not counting travel time. Charge: $60.<\/p>\n
They weren’t happy. “You’re charging us $60 to plug in a phone cable?”<\/p>\n
“Well, you could have done it yourself.”<\/p>\n
I made $60, but I knew I’d never get another call. Or a recommendation. It was easy money, but a disappointing experience.<\/p>\n
The next call was my final call as a computer consultant. The guy, an accountant, was having trouble with his hard drive. I told him to backup the drive and I’d be right over.<\/p>\n
Upon showing up, I whipped out my tools disk and proceeded to run one of my utilities that scanned the hard drive for signs of woe.<\/p>\n
That utility erased his hard drive. It was capable of doing that, and I made the fatal error of assuming he was running MS-DOS and not PC-DOS. I should have checked. Heck, the program should have checked! But it didn’t. Hard drive gone.<\/p>\n
Oddly enough, he wasn’t angry. I didn’t charge him, but he was happy that he did the backup, and he would go out and get a replacement hard drive.<\/p>\n
For me, that was the last straw. My computer consulting career, brief as it was, was over. I don’t regret it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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